When building anything substantial, such as a house or bridge, you start by laying down a solid foundation. Nothing changes this aspect of building brick by brick when you move from traditional constructions to application development and architecting your supporting infrastructure. Throw in Cloud terminology and you might think that the principles of a solid foundation are a bit flighty, but nothing is further from the truth.

When looking to manage an organization's journey into their digital future, CIOs are dealing with a lot of challenges. Challenges that they face on the road to digital transformation can be daunting as first glance, but must be embraced to properly navigate the road to success.

Digital Foundations

Let's take a look in this first article at the challenges CIOs must embrace before diving into how to

support digital aspirations. After that, we dig deeper into what a solid foundation based on open technologies looks like and how it helps you to deliver on several themes that support your digital journey:

• fixing slow delivery of existing solutions
• reducing the complexity in current infrastructure
• increasing the agility in application delivery
• providing scalable solutions for hybrid cloud
• paving the road to your cloud solutions

Challenges to Embrace

The challenges faced when building your digital foundations starts with knowing your business environment, understanding the need to become a software company and that your competition is everywhere.

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All parts of your organization are under pressure, from business to developer to operations. Current delivery of solutions is struggling to keep within budgets, on time and with enough value to compete in your markets.

Businesses are looking to DevOps and the Cloud for solutions to provide better deployment quality, faster release frequencies and more process visibility. The term was coined by Gartner is Bi-modal IT. It describes the approach of two modes of delivery for IT, one focused on agility and speed and the other on stability and accuracy.

The challenges in building this foundation to address Bi-modal IT balance in your organization are split into mode-1 where you find your existing applications facing slow delivery and your current infrastructure has or is becoming too complex to manage. In the mode-2 category, you find cloud native applications struggling to become agile enough to be relevant and cloud infrastructure struggling to find the necessary scalability for your organization.

The story continues...  next up on building the foundations of digital transformation,  I am looking at fixing the slow delivery of existing solutions in an organization.